Marguerite Marshall

My name is Marguerite McCarl was my name in the service – it's now Marshall – and I come from a little place just outside of Niagara Falls called Stanford Centre, and most of the boys that enlisted, enlisted in The Lincoln and Welland Regiment, and we lost almost all the boys. So of course the girls wanted to get in and help. I came up to Hamilton and enlisted. I was too young then, so they sent me home. On my eighteenth birthday I came right up and enlisted and went up to Rockcliffe, scared to death. My parents weren't with it – they thought it was a terrible thing to do – but I wanted it so badly. When I got up to Rockcliffe, it was just different. I was all alone, and yet all the girls were so friendly up there, and it didn't take long before we got to be a group. I liked the discipline. We learned most of the things you had to know being in the military. I was a Clerk/Accountant, so I worked in the payroll department, equipment accounts, and I also worked in the canteen, which was called 'NPF', and I enjoyed that because that's what I had done in civilian life. Then they started sending me to different places. I was in Dunville for a while. I was in St. Thomas, and they had a lot of the boys there that had been shot down in Europe, and of course we went in and helped them. It was very interesting in St. Thomas. I'd never been in a place that had bars on the windows. It was just like being in a club, because some of the girls that were getting married… we had showers just like we would at home. We used to take the little… we called it the 'Tunaville Trolley', to go into London to see the different things. And in London, you had your little haunts there. A place that cooked excellent chicken and things like that – I remember that. I still have a bone in my cedar chest from the first time I ate there. I think I put nail polish on it to preserve it. I was in Mount Hope here. That was exciting because we could live off the station. It was closing, so I lived downtown with a girl that I had met. The only thing I didn't like about that was that everyone was leaving, and the station was getting smaller and smaller.